News Bulletin

JULY 21 2014

With almost 15 million girls, 25 million children are out of school in Pakistan

Approximately 25 million children of school going age are out of school in Pakistan with almost 15 million girls. This is high gender disparity in education at all levels and the number of girls going to school is much lesser than the boys. The number of children labor exceeded 12 million 2013.

The Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training on Friday decided to engage all stakeholders to develop joint programmes for bringing more and more out-of-school children to educational institutions in the country, says a press release. The decision was made during the meeting at the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training. The meeting chaired by Minister of State for Federal Education and Professional Training Balighur Rehman examined the overall situation of out-of-school children in the country and discussed ways and means to enrol these students in formal and non-formal schools. The participants also decided that in future, the National Commission for Human Development, Basic Education Community Schools Project and development partners would work closely for the overall improvement of education sector in the country, especially for accelerating the efforts to achieve the millennium development goals in the country.

For the provision of education in Cholistan, the Punjab had approved funds of 150 million from which 75 non-formal schools will start working while 7 new schools would be opened by Education Department and 4 schools would be upgraded. It was told that 54,000 applications for the allotment of lands have been received from which 46,000 have been scrutinized while the remaining applications will be scrutinized in few days.

National Book Foundation has been offering a comprehensive plan of mobile bookshop for book lovers of the country through holding variety of book reading schemes and incentives for Pakistan. Prof Dr Inamul Haq Javed, managing director of NBF, expressed these views at the key handing ceremony of third mobile bookshop here at NBF head office. This mobile book van has been donated by FATA Secretariat of KP for carrying away the books to the nock and corners of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The keys of this van were handed over to the managing director NBF. Now, three such vans would be used for selling books of different subjects of well-known writers of Pakistan and abroad by providing the book lovers at their threshold.

The Interfaith League Against Poverty (I-LAP), a non-governmental organisation, working for promotion of interfaith harmony, inspired by the efforts and ideas of Malala Yousafzai, on Saturday launched yet another initiative to promote education for young girls. Under this initiative the I-LAP has announced to adopt at least 150 deserving students in the first phase from different schools and all their education expenses including the tuition fee, uniforms, books/stationary and others will be borne by the I-LAP. The ‘Education for Peace’ initiative was launched by the ‘Youth Club of I-LAP’ and the announcement was made at a ceremony arranged to pay tributes to Malala Yousafzai and to join in the efforts to realize the dream of Malala Yousafzai for promotion of education, especially amongst the young girls.

After the bifurcation of the Sindh health department to “improve its performance”, the government is now planning to do the same with the education department. The Pakistan People’s Party-led provincial government had notified the bifurcation of the health department in July last year – separating primary and secondary health care – claiming that it would improve the department’s performance. However, the order was not implemented till earlier this month due to resource constraints, internal tussles and assessment of political consequences. Now the government is also mulling over bifurcating the education department “to improve services”. This was revealed by Education Minister Nisar Khuhro, while talking to the media after a ceremony to distribute training certificates and scholarships among schoolteachers on July 17.

The provincial authorities have deducted Rs500 each from the salaries of teachers of all government colleges in Rawalpindi for a charity cricket match that was scheduled to be held on Friday night. An official of the education department, requesting anonymity, said all gazetted staff of the 110 government colleges in Rawalpindi division was informed that each employee will have to pay Rs500 for the ticket. The match aims to raise funds for the internally displaced persons (IDP) of North Waziristan.

A large number of Internally Displaced Persons are living in 1200 governments schools in Bannu, Dera Ismail Khan and Tank districts. UN officials told media that after summer vacations, these schools will be evacuated by the authorities to resume classes. Therefore government should shift these IDPs to other places.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge,” said the co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, a decade ago. The idea may have sounded outlandish at the time but has since shaped into a digital reality. Throughout human history, civilisations have attached great importance to education and scholarly pursuits. Numerous higher-learning institutions were established in many cultures — from the Platonic Academy in Greece to Takshashilla (Taxila) in the subcontinent to the Taixue of Han Dynasty and the Gundishapur Academy in Persia. With human progress and the introduction of new technologies, however, the media of imparting knowledge have evolved. From the time when primitive people used hand gestures to convey their messages to the current era of e-learning, this evolution is nothing short of revolutionary. And the latest feather in its cap is the introduction of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

A combined meeting of the Steering Committee for supporting IDPs of North Waziristan under the auspices of Higher Education Commission held here at UET Peshawar on Friday. The Higher Education Sector is actively supporting IDPs of North Waziristan Agency. Chairman Steering Committee Imtiaz Gilani, Vice Chancellor University of Engineering and Technology (UET) Peshawar, deliberated on the plan of action on three main areas, including education, health and rehabilitation. The meeting decided to offer free of cost education to IDPs at all public and some private universities of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Representatives from Peshawar University, Gomal University D.I.Khan, UET, Peshawar, Khyber Medical University (KMU), IM-Sciences, Islamia College, Sarhad University, and Agriculture University, Peshawar announced seats for IDPs for the session 2014-15 in undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Free education will be offered to the people displaced by the North Waziristan military operation, at all public and some private universities of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, decided the steering committee at a meeting at UET Peshawar on Friday. UET VC Imtiaz H Gilani, who is the chairman of the steering committee, deliberated on the plan of action on three main areas, including education, health and rehabilitation. The meeting was convened by the Higher Education Commission.

The Sindh government has decided to bifurcate the education department to improve the quality of its services, The Express Tribune has learnt. This move comes after a similar step was taken in the health department as well. Both these decisions have, however, yet to be implemented.

Four months since boundary wall of Girls High School has been razed to ground

It has been four months since boundary wall of Government Girls High School Bochal Kalah has been razed to ground. People demand that the boundary wall be built again so the students who are getting studying in the school can feel safe again.

As far as education is concerned, Pakistan is lagging behind small countries of South Asia like Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan. It is very disappointing to see Pakistan moving downwards in education rankings in 21st century, the century of education.

A steering committee of the Higher Education Commission for support of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from North Waziristan met at the University of Engineering and Technology (UET) on Friday and announced free education along with Rs5,000 monthly stipends to the displaced students in all the major public sector and some private universities of the province. The meeting, also attended by UET Vice-Chancellor Syed Imtiaz Hussain Gilani, discussed a plan of action on three main areas, including education, health and rehabilitation of the displaced tribal people. The meeting decided to offer free education to IDPs at all public and some private universities of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Provincial Minister for Education Punjab, Rana Mashhod said that Punjab Higher Education Commision will be established during this year. Knowledge Park has become a company in the province and 7 international universities will set-up their campuses in knowledge park during this year, he added.

Though the executive director (ED) of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) is appointed through a competitive process in the management position (MP) scale, the HEC chairperson is lobbying to have this converted into the ‘vice chancellor’s package’. To this end, HEC Chairperson Dr Mukhtar Ahmed has started meeting the members of the commission individually to get their approval. Dr Mukhtar claimed that it was necessary to change the MP scale into the VC’s package. However, the founding chairperson of the HEC, Dr Attaur Rahman, calls the move ‘a fraud’. MP-scale officers are private individuals who are appointed after a comparative process on specific management positions.

The recent proposal to establish three new sub-campuses of University of Gujrat (UoG) at the colleges of Chakwal, Narowal and Rawalpindi has invited severe opposition from the teachers of Chakwal and Narowal. The principal of the college in Rawalpindi, however, has supported the move. UoG Vice Chancellor (VC) Prof Dr Mohammad Nizamuddin wrote a letter, available with Dawn, to the Punjab Higher Education Department (HED) secretary on June 10, in which he sought a “quick decision” to upgrade the Government Postgraduate College Chakwal, Government Islamia Postgraduate College Narowal and Government Postgraduate College for Women Satellite Town Rawalpindi to the status of sub-campuses of UoG.

The sixth Syndicate meeting of the Islamia College University, Peshawar, which met here yesterday with Vice Chancellor, Professor Dr. Qibla Ayaz in the chair increased the quota of minorities in the ICP service from 1 per cent to 3 per cent in accordance with a government decision. The Syndicate meeting, representing a host of divergent opinions, contrary to past practice, this time met in an atmosphere of cooperation and accommodated divergent views with mutual understanding. As a result, the meeting remained smooth and proved to be less time consuming. The ICP Syndicate approved the Statutes for Meritorious professor for its onward passage to the ICP Senate meeting to be held some time in future for giving a final approval to these statutes.

In the post-18th Amendment scene, education has been devolved to the provincial governments. This was one of the achievements of the PPP government that went overall unacknowledged and the results of the 2013 elections displayed a general displeasure of the masses with the PPP. Irrespective of the poor performance of the previous government, the 18th Amendment remains a hallmark of democratic legislation with which almost all political parties tried to correct the wrongs of the previous decades. Education is one such subject that has come to mean a lot for the provincial governments and despite the attempts of the new PML-N government to undo some of the changes, the provincial governments — other than Punjab — have expressed their desire to continue with the devolved ministries without surrendering any of the authorities given to them through this amendment.

When the British first annexed the Punjab there was a local system of education, usually linked to the local Hindi, Muslim or Sikh religious institutions, or patronised by local strong men. Dr Leitner, the first Principal of Government College Lahore and the founder of the University of the Punjab, noted in his History of Indigenous Education in the Punjab: “…there is not a mosque, a temple, a dharamsala, that had a school not attached to it…There were also thousands of secular schools, frequented alike by Muhammadans, Hindus and Sikhs…there was not a single villager who did not take pride in devoting at least a portion of his produce to a respected teacher…In short, the computation gives us 330,000 pupils…in the schools of various denominations who were acquainted in reading, writing, and some method of computation.”

English as a medium education system was the worst decision that was made by the elite class of our society right after the inception of Pakistan. It was the decision that made layers in our education system and made it worst in the world. Urdu on the other hand should have been implemented as everybody knows Urdu all over the country.

Nobody can ignore the importance of examination system in overall education progress of any country. Unfortunately, in Pakistan it is one of the most ignored part of our dysfunctional education system.

CURIOUS to a fault, I follow scientific developments and discoveries with interest. In particular, recent advances in astrophysics and quantum phenomena fascinate me. These inquiries into the birth of the universe and what it is composed of are at the very forefront of research. So when the elusive Higgs Boson was finally nailed down after years at the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, I was thrilled at the breakthrough. Similarly, I got very excited when reports that a sub-nuclear particle might have exceeded the speed of light appeared in the media. Had this been proved conclusively, modern physics would have been turned on its head. Sadly, it was found that a wiring defect in the equipment has produced a number of false readings.